


Kinsey Zero

by jedusaur



Category: Video Blogging & YouTube RPF
Genre: M/M, Meta, Not My Fault, awkward kitchen metaphors, bin liners, the kinsey scale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-09
Updated: 2013-08-09
Packaged: 2017-12-22 21:47:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/918399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedusaur/pseuds/jedusaur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You feel there's a more realistic approach they could take to writing about my dick in your arse?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kinsey Zero

**Author's Note:**

  * For [greedy_dancer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greedy_dancer/gifts).



> This is entirely GD's fault. Unbetaed and un-Britpicked, because I don't respect this fic enough to treat it like a lady.

"It's not the fanfic itself I mind," says Dan.

Phil doesn't look up from his laptop screen. Dan knows from long experience that he's half-listening, and if Dan ever gets around to an actual point, he'll retroactively piece together the sentence and join in the conversation. But Dan's randomly-voiced philosophical thoughts usually trail off into either a soliloquy about the relative merits of various types of cereal or yet another reinterpretation of the Katamari Damacy theme song, so Phil doesn't generally bother tuning in immediately. (Although he does join in on the Katamari Damacy remixes. He doesn’t need to be paying attention for that.)

Dan's going somewhere with this, though. "I love fandom, you know that. And it's not even that the fanfic is _bad_ , or at least not just that. Anyone can put their stuff out there on the internet, and they should! If you had to be all perfect and polished before posting a video to YouTube, I'd've been fucked when I started out. I fully support the right of the internet to spew terrible fanfic."

"Right," says Phil absently.

"Here's the thing, though." Dan points to his screen. "I found this one here about Grimmy and Harry Styles, it's practically a book it's so long, where they start as friends and then hook up and eventually fall in love and stuff. And it's really well-written. There's piles of shit fanfic about them too, but there are a lot that are actually good. And there's lots of good ones about My Chemical Romance. But I've never found a single one about us that wasn't awful. Is it just that you have to be massively famous before the good writers bother with you?"

Phil shrugs. "I dunno. I don't really read it."

"I don't _really_ either, you're making it sound like I spend all my time sniffing out porn about us. You're the one who started it with the Tumblr tag videos, remember?" Dan scrolls down. He did start off looking at his own tag, but somehow he's now twelve hours back in the "phan" tag. "They're just all so unrealistic. If you and I were actually gay and actually had sex, it wouldn't start with one of us just randomly declaring his love for the other. Or..." He scrolls down some more. "Or with you noticing me blushing when I look at you and figuring out I was lusting after you based on that. Remember that time you asked if I'd got a haircut five days after I got it? There's not a chance in hell you'd notice a blush. None of these situations make any _sense_."

Phil seems to be trying, not very hard, to keep a straight face. "You feel there's a more realistic approach they could take to writing about my dick in your arse?"

Dan is a forward-thinking young man with modern views on masculinity, so he doesn't get distracted by the question of whose dick goes in whose arse here. "A _little_ more realistic."

"Like what?"

Dan narrows his eyes at Phil. "Are you trying to get me to write fanfic about us? I'm not doing that."

"I’m really, really not trying to get you to do that," Phil says, and goes back to reading his comments.

***

It's not much of a secret that Dan is concerned about what people think of him. Pretty much all YouTubers are. A healthy sense of vanity is sort of a job requirement, and insecurity tends to go along with that. Seeing people talking about him, caring about him, is satisfying on a level not much else can reach. When they're invested enough in his life to make up stories about it, it's hard to resist trying to analyze that and figure out what it means.

Which he really shouldn't do, because most of it doesn't seem to have very deep implications about the authors' opinions of him. Generally, those opinions seem to be "these two guys are hot and they'd be hotter with a bit less space between them." There's no need to examine the matter any further.

***

"Like alcohol," Dan says.

Phil does his confused eyebrows.

"I feel like most situations involving two straight guys--or closeted gay guys--going from best mates to making out would involve booze," Dan elaborates.

"You're still thinking about this," says Phil. "Are you trying to tell me something?"

"No, and that's another thing!" Dan puts his laptop down and leans his elbows on his knees. "If I was into cock, and I spent this long living with you without mentioning it, wouldn't you think that mistrust would be something to address in, in the narrative?"

"I'm a little bit into cock and I've never mentioned it," says Phil.

Dan blinks, derailed. "Really?"

"It's got nothing to do with trust. I’ve just never really thought you needed to know." Phil shrugs. "I'm not even very into it, just a little. It's not like I'm sneaking around to gay clubs without telling you or anything. It's mostly just porn, once in a while. I guess I’m, like, one notch off ‘straight’ on the sexual orientation scale."

"Huh," says Dan, then adds, “It’s called the Kinsey scale,” because there’s no point spending half his life on Tumblr without showing off once in a while.

He spends the next five minutes trying to remember which end of the scale is the gay end before he remembers he has a laptop in front of him.

***

He doesn’t forget about it, exactly, but he doesn’t reflect on it much until he’s lying in bed contemplating his inner eyelids at two in the morning. It shouldn’t matter, and it doesn’t, really; it’s just a tiny shift in his awareness of someone he thought he knew inside and out. It makes him think about what else he doesn’t know, about Phil and his other friends and his family.

And then, because the world is never anything but a gigantic mirror when he’s feeling introspective, he starts wondering what he doesn’t know about himself. Every now and then he notices something--a habit, an attitude--that he’s had all his life and never thought to examine, and every time it takes him off-guard. Because really, someone whose entire existence is so intrinsically self-centered ought to know themselves pretty well by now. He doesn’t expect to surprise himself anymore. And yet it keeps happening.

He tries jerking off while thinking about penises. It’s spectacularly ineffective. Thinking about the penises in his favorite straight pornos kind of works, but he suspects that sort of Pavlovian thing doesn’t count. Then he pictures Phil getting himself off to gay porn, and ends up giving up on his dick entirely. Definitely a Kinsey zero.

***

“No, you know what would really be realistic?” says Dan. “A video. If we came up with an idea we really like for a video that only worked if we kissed on-camera. That would definitely be the most plausible scenario for us to admit our love. Both of us will do absolutely anything for a good video.”

“Like a kissing tutorial video?” Phil asks. He doesn’t look impressed.

Dan shakes his head. “No, like a reference to a famous kiss that we have to recreate for it to be funny. Maybe, like, a skit about that time you slept until six PM and I thought you were dead, done like Sleeping Beauty. With you as the princess, and me as the prince who has to kiss you to get you to wake up.”

“There was a prophecy when I was born that I would prick myself on an earring and fall into a deep sleep,” says Phil. “They all told me to stay away from men with pierced ears, but I was young and foolish.”

“Yes!” Dan points at him triumphantly. “And there’s dirty clothes piled neck-high around your bed that I have to fight through, like brambles.”

They stare at each other for a long moment, and Dan knows what Phil’s thinking before he says it, because he’s thinking the same thing.

“We could just edit so it ends when you’re leaning down and cut to me waking up,” says Phil. “Or pan behind a pile of dirty clothes right before. We wouldn’t actually have to do it.”

Dan shakes his head, because that’s the whole point. They do have to.

***

They use inflated bin liners to prop up the laundry, since they don’t actually own enough clothing to make a neck-high pile all the way around Phil’s bed. On the first take, Dan sets up the structure in such a way that when he dramatically hacks his way in, some of the bin liners on the other side of the bed fall over and a pair of jeans lands on the camera.

It takes ages to get everything set up properly again, with no plastic peeking through the clothes. The second time, Dan makes sure to do most of the dramatic hacking on non-load-bearing bin liners. Then he’s standing by a bed that has Phil lying on it in his pajamas, waiting to be kissed.

Dan pauses to make some appropriate facial expressions, running through the voiceover script in his head to make sure he leaves enough time. Then he leans down, tenderly cupping Phil’s neck with his hand, and delivers a Princess Bride-worthy snog. He’s not expecting Phil to kiss back, since Phil is supposed to be in a deadly sleep, but when he does, there’s nothing to do but go along with it. If he ruins the take, they’ll need to set up all the damn bin liners _again_.

One time, months ago, they were goofing off in the kitchen and Dan stood up on the counter. He can’t remember why--they weren’t even drunk, which is probably a good thing for the structural integrity of his skull. What he remembers is how different their kitchen looked like from way up high. Everything was familiar, but the angles were all different, and the floor took up more space than it had ever seemed to before.

It’s sort of like that, except with a person he’s been looking at for years instead of a room. It’s the same face as always, but zoomed in, with a disproportionate focus on the mouth. It doesn’t help that Phil’s fucking phenomenal at kissing, which Dan didn’t predict. He thought this would be silly, a wet smack and a cartoony fairytale ending, but they’ve already been kissing for much longer than he planned.

He draws back, realizing as he does that he really doesn’t want to. He tries to process this without showing it, because fuck the bin liners, he can’t do another take of _that._

Phil is waking up, stretching, asking what time it is, moving on with the script. Dan gets through the rest of it, and then there’s a beat of silence to make editing easier, and then they both start laughing.

“I can’t believe we did that,” Phil says. “I can’t believe _you_ did that.”

“I can’t either.” Dan looks down, realizing that he’s got a knee up on the bed. Christ, he must have been practically lying on Phil. “You’re an unbelievable kisser, did you know?”

“Why?” moans Phil. “Why is it that the only person who truly appreciates my tonsil tennis skills is a straight man?”

“I think,” says Dan, and then pauses and starts his sentence over. “I’m a Kinsey zero, all right, I’m all the way at the straight end of the scale. But... I think maybe that’s because they only come in whole numbers? I might be rounding down a bit. I could be point-three, point-four.”

Phil smiles, that tentative little smile that makes his whole face look like a question. “You saying you want to snog me some more?”

Dan takes a deep breath, then wrinkles his nose and says, “I’m not saying shit with the camera on.”

Phil laughs, and knocks down the bin liners again reaching over to turn it off.


End file.
